Inside this Issue

FROM THE DIRECTOR'S DESKACHIEVEMENTSCAMPUS NEWSCAMPUS CALENDAR APRIL 2019

From the Director's Desk

The eventful month of March saw UC Berkeley professor, and our

former Board Member, Prof. Jitendra Malik getting IEEE

Computer Pioneer award. ACM named Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey

Hinton, and Yann LeCun recipients of the 2018 ACM A.M. Turing

Award (on 27th March) for conceptual and engineering

breakthroughs that have made Deep Neural Networks a critical

component of computing. Mathematician Dr. Karen Uhlenbeck

become the first woman to win the Abel prize (on 19th March).

Her work laid the foundations for the unification of two of the

four fundamental forces of nature: electromagnetism and the

weak nuclear force. Closer home, 13th March was celebrated at

IISc Bangalore, as the “Artificial Intelligence (AI) Day”, that

provided just the right forum for discussions on the impact of AI

on the various interleaved strands of education, research,

industry, society and entrepreneurship. Right here on our

campus, March was a hectic month with SPANDAN from 15th to

17th, TEDx on 23rd, and Wikipedia Edit-a-thon on Women's

Histories on 30th March. We also had a number of our students

Srikant Nadig, Meghana Reddy, Shashank getting admissions in

premier institutes for Ph.D. More details about the other

interesting developments in March in the newsletter.

HAPPY READING!

Achievements

One of the in-house products of Zense (IIITB’s Student’s Club), i.e.,

CircuitVerse, (CircuitVerse.org) has been selected as a participating organization for

Google Summer of Code'19 (GSoC'19). For details: https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/organ…/6560513423572992/

The team Parvaaz (Theatre Arts

Club) came second in the stage play

competition, Natyashastra in the

National Cultural fest, Pearl at BITS

Pilani, Hyderabad campus, held during

March 22-24. They performed an

adaptation of the play "Saawdhaan!

Dulhe ki talaash hai" by Vijay Tendulkar.

VideoKen received a “Best in Class AI Start-up” award (one of three) at NASSCOM

Technology & Leadership Forum 2019. This event was held in Mumbai with

collaboration with Mphasis, an Information Technology (IT) solutions provider

specialising in cloud and cognitive services, in an effort to advance the AI ecosystem

of India.

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/activity:6504204624369680384/

Congratulations to the team!

Prof. Amit Chattopadhyay is a winner of a research grant under the CRG (Core

Research Grant)-scheme by SERB (Science and Engineering Research Board)

for a project titled "Topological Data Analysis: Tools for Multivariate". Prof.

Amit Chattopadhyay is the PI of the project. The duration of the funding will be for

three years and the total amount is approximately INR 30 lakhs.

Congratulations!

Our student Shreekantha Nadig has been selected as an Intel® AI Academy

Student Ambassador on Mar 26, 2019. The Intel® Student Ambassador Programme

for AI is an exciting new programme for university students to engage with Intel

around their work in Machine Learning, Deep Learning, and Artificial Intelligence. The

Student Ambassador Programme is a developer affinity programme, designed to assist

student experts in telling their story and share their expertise with other student data

scientists and developers. The goal of this programme is to help drive innovation and evangelism of Artificial

Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning worldwide by supporting students,

professors, and researchers with education and technical resources. This effort is

designed to drive innovation and advancements in the AI space and to co-create the

future of AI together with Intel.

The project titled "Microarchitectural techniques to design a secure processor"

has been approved by SERB (https://www.serbonline.in) for the Core Research

Grant Award. The grant is of INR 60 lakh approximately over a period of 3 years. The

proposal was submitted in June 2018, with Prof. Nanditha Rao as the PI along with

Prof. Subir Roy as Co-PI.

Congratulations!

Prof. V. Sridhar received funding of Rs. 18,48,230/- for the project titled "The Future

of Licensed Spectrum in a 5G-OTT World, from the Indian Institute of Management

IDEA Telecom Centre.”

3MPT Competition is a platform for students to present their research work to their

peers and experts in the field. It was conducted by IEEE Student Branch, Indian

Institute of Space Technology (IIST) and IEEE Antenna Propagation Society Kerala

Chapter in association with CONSCIENTIA-2019. From IIITB, Jhalak Sharma

(MS2018005), Aheesh K. N. (MS2017001) and Spoorthi M. N. (MS2017007) were

shortlisted to present at IIST during March 1-4. There were 2 rounds for the

competition. In the first round, the key is to present the idea strictly within 3 minutes.

The second round allowed 2 more minutes to add any additional information or demo

the hardware etc. Jhalak and Spoorthi were selected to the second round, and

Spoorthi won the first place in the competition.

Congratulations!

Campus News

At the time of Rise IIITB 2019, during the IMACX summit, start-ups - Rytangle,

New Age Analytics and Ziroh labs received recognition awards by the chief

guest, Ms.Valarmathi N, Deputy Director - Indian Space Research

Organization.

The annual sports fest of IIITB - Spandan, was organized during 15-17th March. This

year Spandan was organized by sports committee under the guidance and supervision of

Prof. Srinivasa Raghavan and Mr. Harish Ponnappa. This was the first time Gym events were

also included in Spandan, and also introduced rolling trophies for Football, Cricket, Gully

Cricket, Basketball, Throwball, Tug of War, Volley Ball and gym events. In total, there was

496 individual registrations and 513 team registrations. Also, special events/sports events

like Gully Cricket and Badminton are organized for faculty and staff.

The second edition of TEDxIIITBangalore was held on 23rd March at IIIT

Bangalore. We had 9 speakers from all over the country specialised in fields ranging

from music to journalism. ‘INDIGO 91.9 FM’ was our radio partner and ‘Your Design’

was our merchandise partner for the event.

List of Speakers:

1. Rohini Rau - Asian Games Gold Medalist/Doctor

2. Kumaran SS - World Record Holding Drummer

3. Roopa Moudgil - IPS Police Officer

4. Shashank Udupa - Entrepreneur

5. Kanchan Kaur - Professor of Journalism

6. Sairam Sagiraju - Movie Director

7. Jagdish Chaturvedi - Stand Up Comedian/ENT Surgeon

8. Richa Kumar - Professor of Sociology

9. Akshay Saxena - Educationalist/Entrepreneur

Centre for Information Technology and Public Policy (CITAPP) at IIITB organized a

Wikipedia Edit-a-thon on March 30 and theme of the event was “Women's

Histories”. As part of the event, a small but enthusiastic group of IIITB students and

others got together on campus to contribute images and articles on women to

Wikipedia. After 3 hours of intense activity led by an experienced Wikipedian, we had

added content on notable women from various walks of life, including a violinist, an

ISRO scientist and a historian of science. In addition, they built a crowdsourced list of

notable women that we hope can be a useful starting point for future events. We look

forward to building on this momentum and make our Edit-a-thon a monthly feature

where we can work together remotely or in-person to bring visibility to relatively

invisible communities and topics on Wikipedia. Our next two Edit-a-thons will focus on

Dalit Histories (April) and Labour histories (May). We also plan to start a Wikiclub on

campus in the new academic year.

The article titled “A cautionary note on spectrum auctions” by Prof. V. Sridhar and

Heikki Hammaimen has been published in Financial Express on March 21.

The same can be accessed at: https://www.financialexpress.com/opinion/5g-a-

cautionary-note-on-spectrum-auctions/1522848/

Prof. Sujit Kumar Chakrabarti delivered an invited talk on “Machine Learning and

Software Engineering” at the Department of Computer Science, Indian Academy Degree

College, Bengaluru on March 23.

Late Reporting

Debanjali Bhattacharya and Prof. Neelam Sinha presented their paper titled “Structural

MRI based texture analysis of corpus callosum in classifying Progressive

supranuclear palsy” in MedImage2018 (ICVGIP), December 2018.

"Brief on ICT Trends: Digital Identity", published by the United Nations Asia

Pacific Training Centre for ICT and Development (UN-APCICT) in February 2019

http://www.unapcict.org/sites/default/files/inline-

files/ICT%20TRENDS_Digital%20Identity.pdf

"Brief on ICT Trends: Education", published by the United Nations Asia Pacific Training

Centre for ICT and Development (UN-APCICT) in February 2019. URL:

https://www.unapcict.org/sites/default/files/inline-

files/ICT%20TRENDS_%20ICT%20for%20Education.pdf

Contributors: Prof Amit Prakash, Tarun Pandey (MT2017128), and Srravya C (MSc. Digital

Society)

Soumyo Das (MS2017015) and Prof. Bidisha Chaudhuri presented their paper titled,

“Automation & Skill: A Lesson in History” at the Association for Information

Systems Being (More) Human in a Digitised World Workshop held at IIM Calcutta, 1-2

February 2019.

“How the Blockchain Can Add Transparency to Healthcare” by B Thangaraju and

Vaibhav Aggarwal (Imt2015045) has been published in OpenSource For U.com on February

8.

Tridib Sarma (MT2017525) presented a paper titled "Effect of Leakage Currents in

Adiabatic Logic Circuits at Lower Technology Nodes" co-authored by Prof.

Chetan Parikh, at the IEEE International Conference on Modelling of Systems, Circuits,

and Devices (MOS-AK India 2019), at IIT Hyderabad, held during February 25 to 27.

Prof. Shiva Prakash Malapaka gave an invited talk titled “Using OpenMP and MPI in

Modeling and Simulations” at Department Of Computer Science And Engineering,

Thiagarajar College Of Engineering, Madurai, Tamil Nadu, in the AICTE QIP Sponsored

Short Term Course on High Performance Computing for Science and Engineering, held

between February 4-10 as a Resource Person.

Prof. Meenakshi D'Souza visited St. Claret College, Bangalore on 1st of March 2019

to inaugurate the ACM-W India chapter there, and gave a lecture on Women in

Computing History.

Prof. Shiva Kumar Malapaka gave an invited talk titled “Spectral, visualization

and statistical studies of helicity forced and decaying 3D-MHD turbulent

flows” at Solar Helicities in Theory and Observations: Implications for Space Weather

and Dynamo Theory conference during March 4-29 at NORDITA, Stockholm, Sweden.

Prof. Pradeesha Ashok delivered an invited talk on the topic "Ramsey Theory" at

Department of Mathematics, CMR Institute of Technology, Bengaluru on March 8.

Prof. V. Sridhar conducted a Ph.D. examination of Baidyanath Biswas on his

dissertation titled "A framework for cyber risk management for organizations"

at the Indian Institute of Management Lucknow on March 11.

Dr. Dinesh Babu J was an invited speaker at a couple of venues. The talk at the International Conference on Cloud Computing in Emerging Markets (CCEM)

Pre-conference, Bangalore was titled "Human-Centered Multimodal Analytics and

Applications" and given on March 1. The talk at the RIKEN-IITH Workshop on Machine Learning and Applications held at

IIT Hyderabad was titled "Applied human behavior tracking and perception" and delivered on

March 15.

State of the Art Seminar of Ms. Chaitali Diwan, PH2016002, on Automatic

Generation of Learning Pathways for Navigated Learning was held on 18th

March.

Oral Thesis Defence of Ms. Sunita Katre (MS2016005) Improved voice call performance

of tactical military networks by means of differential priority and variable MTU size

selection mechanisms was held on 7th March.

State-of-the-Art Seminar of Manpreet Kaur Jaswal (PH2016006) on "Performance

Enhancement of Microprocessors through Value Prediction based on Dynamic

Data Flow Analysis" on March 25.

March 1: Mr. Manish Kumar, CEO, Rooman Technologies

March 1: Mr. Bharat Gera, St. John’s National Academy of Health Sciences

March 1: Mr. Srinivas Garimella, Director at Microsoft

March 11: Prof. Lauren Kay Robel, Provost, and Mr. M.A. Venkataramanan, Vice

Provost for Finance and Strategy, Indiana University, Bloomington

March 14: Prof. Banshidhar Majhi, Director, IIITDM Kancheepuram

March 14: Mr. Robert Bolton, Education Editor & Mr. Sriram Kasthuri, Director

Investments- South Asia, Australian Financial Review

March 14: Ms. Polly Fryer, Commercial Director of Times Higher Education & Mr. Dipit

Sharma, Regional Director - South Asia, Times Higher Education

March 15: Prof. Dr.-Ing. habil. Madhukar Pandit, University of Kaiserslautern,

Germany

March 19: A team from Intel AI Academy (Bangalore, Mumbai, US) visited IIITB to

discuss possible engagements between IIITB faculty/students and Intel AI Academy

related to Intel Dev Cloud, Student Ambassador programme and programme

curriculum usage and development. The team from Intel comprised of Mr. Jayaraman

Mahalingam, Intel AI Academic Tech Programme Manager, Bengaluru; Mr. Sachin

Kelkar, Head, Developer Marketing, Mumbai; Ms. Arti Gupta, Director of Developer

Programmes strategy and experience, USA

March 21: Mr. Sanjay Sahay, IPS, ADGP, Police Computer Wing, Bangalore

March 21: Shri. N V Maslekar, Chief Executive officer at Sattva eTECH India Pvt. Ltd

March 21: Ms. Manasi Prasad, Project Director, Indian Music Experience

March 26: Shri. Bhavesh R Trivedi, Director (DPA), MEA and Shri. Robin Jain, AO

(FIN-II), MEA

March 26: Dr. Satya Kalyan Mohanty, Manager, Strategic Accounts, Check Point

Software Technologies

March 27: Mr. Ronnie Screwvala, Founder UTV Group

March 27: Dr. Rajiv Chetwani, Director, ISRO Headquarters

March 28: Prof. Raj Kamal, Prestige Institute of Engineering, Management and

Research

March 13: "Remote User Authentication and Key Establishment Protocol for Smart

Home" by Dr. Mohammad Wazid, Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science and

Engineering, Manipal Institute of Technology, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, India.

20 March 2019: Dr. Amit Bhardwaj, Haptics and Virtual Reality Laboratory,

Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH), South Korea, delivered a

lecture on “Data-driven haptic rendering of viscoelastic deformable objects”

27 March 2019: Dr. N. Dayasindhu, CEO of itihaasa Research and Digital delivered a lecture

on the "Landscape of AI/ML Research in India."

March 18: “Agent-Based Models and Energy Efficiency Studies” by Prof. Shrisha

Rao

March 25: “Problems in classical and modern channel coding theory” by Dr. Arti D

Yardi

April 13: RUNBHOOMI - RUN for Lake

April 13-14: INFIN 8

Admissions open for following programmes:

M.Tech (CSE) - https://www.iiitb.ac.in/admission_research.php?pid=mtech-

cse-admissions

M.Tech (ECE) - https://www.iiitb.ac.in/admission_research.php?pid=mtech-

ece-admissions

Research Programmes - https://www.iiitb.ac.in/content.php?pid=admissions-

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